Monti Glimpses EU Political Union and Chides Germany

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on Monday said that “significant steps” have been taken towards European integration and that the public has not fully cottoned on to all of them.

The agreement that national governments will submit their annual budgets to Brussels before sending them to their own legislative assemblies “gives an idea of political union,” Mr. Monti said in a speech Monday at the Italian Stock Exchange Monday.

Mr. Monti, a former European commissioner, has been busy thinking quite a lot — and out loud — about the political future of the European Union, a subject on which he gave a speech in Strasbourg last week, on top of penning an essay for Le Monde.

On that occasion, he headlined the importance of making the European Parliament a fully-fledged parliament for the 27-member union.

On Monday in Milan, he explored a corollary to that, saying it was increasingly important that national parliaments learn about European policy matters.

That may be because national-level lawmakers seem increasingly in limbo.

In Italy, where there are now fewer than 945 deputies and senators, a per-capita ratio of almost 10 times the United States, they are already practically unemployed, as Mr. Monti took pains not to note.

Appointed to head a technocrat cabinet last November, Mr. Monti said he was “fascinated” to watch the country’s politicians react to evidence that the country’s citizens are more willing to entertain change than the party leaders imagined.

He also sent a couple of wake-up calls to Italy’s EU partners.

For one, he called the fiscal compact EU leaders will sign next month as “perhaps not strictly necessary” and mainly just something that Germany and the European Central Bank wanted.

He added that he was happy to oblige, not least as that means nobody will have to talk about it any more. And with the Greek crisis about to be “closed, or at least put into parentheses,” some eight countries — none of them Germany or France — will be presenting their case for pro-growth policies in Brussels at the next European Council summit, he added.

That will mean pushing for Germany to pry open its closed domestic services sector in the same way Italy is, he noted.

Mr. Monti also said that while his government was willing to back the so-called “Tobin tax” on financial transactions so desired by France and Germany, he didn’t see it “as in any way a magical solution.”

But if Italians get too excited about a head of government able to fight the country’s corner on the regional stage, Mr. Monti tossed some gentle grenades into the financial elite gathered at the Milan bourse, which is known for incestuous shareholding alliances between a handful of families.

Keeping a company Italian is not always in its own interest, he said. “Some may see blue-blooded financiers as an elegant notion, but quite often it seems they have worked mainly to allow the survival of companies that in some cases might have been better served with a bit of Schumpeterian creative destruction,” he said.

Comments (1 of 1)

Interestingly enough, as we discuss integration, some European nations are officially retiring their former currencies which have largely been unused for a decade since the introduction of the euro. The French franc was officially taken out of circulation this past Friday and others are to follow (in a delicious twist of irony, this includes Greece).